


The Third Death of Hella Varal

by LuckyDiceKirby



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: F/F, Secret Samol 2018, gay knight shit what up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-16 08:20:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17546039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LuckyDiceKirby/pseuds/LuckyDiceKirby
Summary: Death has always been Hella’s close companion, dogging her every step. Adelaide is no different.





	The Third Death of Hella Varal

**Author's Note:**

  * For [homsantoft (tofsla)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/gifts).



> Happy Secret Samol, Eli! This got away from me a bit. I hope you like it!
> 
> The prompt I picked was "gestures of fealty, but made Weird". If there's one thing I love, it's making things Weird.
> 
> Spoilers through SiH 15.

Aubade never feels right for plenty of reasons. It’s always the perfect temperature, just a few degrees warmer than Hella likes. The apples don’t taste quite right—apparently all apples in Hieron used to taste like this, but there was some kind of blight that messed them up, which fascinates Lem to no end. 

And no one dies. No one ever fears death, or welcomes it, or flees from it to the edges of the world. It is absent, in truth and in thought, and that is not a way that Hella knows how to live.

Death has always been Hella’s close companion, dogging her every step. She met it first in the woods by her home, and it wore the shape of a wolf, hungry and lost. It attacked her, and gave her three things: her first scar, faded now with time where it crosses from her knee to the top of her thigh; her first true fear, bubbling up from her ribs to her throat, stealing away her words; and her first kill, bloodying the small knife she’d stolen from the kitchen.

Hella Varal wiped off her blade, and returned home triumphant. Death followed her, yes, but always at a distance, kept on the other end of a blade. Hella Varal did not die; Hella Varal brought death wherever she walked.

Meeting Tristero was the first time Hella’s death had a face. It was the sort of face she expected. Austere, harsh, demanding too much of her, a price she could do nothing but pay. Tristero’s was the kind of death she gave Calhoun, the kind that left you wounded to grant. 

But Adelaide was not the face of death that Hella expected or understood. Adelaide never demanded anything; she insinuated, she suggested, she teased, but underneath it there was the same ironclad understanding Tristero had: the knowledge that she would be obeyed. The same knowledge that carries Hella through each swing of her sword, sure her strike will find its mark. 

Hella didn’t realize it before Aubade, until the moment Adelaide grabbed her wrist and dug her nails in and fell into the unknown after her. She thought that Adelaide’s residence in her skin was temporary. That once Hella banished Adelaide from her mind, her life would once again follow its true course. But Hella has not served only Ordenna in a long time. There’s no mark where Adelaide grabbed her wrist. It didn’t even bruise. But sometimes Hella wishes it had, that there was concrete evidence of what happened that day, what had already been happening for a long time: Adelaide invading Hella’s heart, digging her fingers in and refusing to let go.

Again and again, she lets Adelaide talk her way onto the stupid boat. Stubbornness has followed Hella for nearly as long as death, but even she can’t deny that means _something_.

There is no true death in Aubade. But there is Adelaide, following Hella just as surely, never leaving her any peace.

When the time comes, Adelaide doesn’t ask to leave with them. She can’t, not any more than Hella could ask her to come. Hella’s never been cautious. She’s not like Adaire; she can’t see a trap before it’s been sprung. At least this one goes both ways, the snare around their ankles, this pattern they’ve fallen into. Sailing and apples and pearls. They can’t escape it now.

Neither of them can ask, but luckily, they have their own ways of talking. 

“You’re really bringing all that?” Hella asks, watching Adelaide load her luggage.

“I might turn to dust the moment we leave,” Adelaide says. “I may as well do so in style.” She shoves a trunk into Hella’s arms, heedless of the modest, reasonably sized pack Hella’s already carrying. “Deal with this for me, won’t you, dear?”

“I could just throw it overboard, you know,” Hella says. She makes an aborted gesture, as if she’s going to do it. The trunk really is heavy. Hella can feel herself start to sweat, the air around them humid as the storm picks up. 

“Try it,” Adelaide says lazily over her shoulder, going to retrieve more of her endless things. She’s only even bringing any of it to piss Hella off. 

Years ago, Hella would have made good on her threat. Even now, she dearly wants to, just to show Adelaide who exactly is in charge. Instead, she stows it securely belowdecks. 

And then she sails them into the storm, death at her side like always. 

When they land, Hella turns instinctively. There’s no one there. That’s her first thought, back in Hieron for the first time in four years: where is Adelaide? Is she okay? Did the storm snatch her away, forever out of Hella’s grasp, is she finally _gone_ , has Hella been cut loose from everything—

It’s familiar, Adelaide’s laugh ringing in her head. But it strikes a different chord in Hella’s breast than she remembers. 

-

When Hella was sworn into the service of the Ordennan army, she was sure. Her heart was cool heavy stone in her chest, immovable, intractable. She would die for the glory of Ordenna, and she would do it grinning, with blood in her teeth. 

When she is sworn into the service of Adelaide, her heart is liquid and hot in her chest, and the rest of her feels the same.

“Uh. I don’t really know how this works.”

Hella is alone. That’s not true. Adelaide is with her, always. But Hella _feels_ alone, standing in a secluded clearing half a mile from the Last University. Alone and kind of stupid, talking aloud to nothing. Just the dead trees and dead grass surrounding the extremely dead dirt she’s tramped all over with her heavy boots. Adelaide had been very clear on that front: if Hella was going to do this, she would be surrounded by dead things, fully in Adelaide’s domain. No plants or animals, not the normal ones or the new ones that give Hella the creeps. Just the world scraped clean. 

Adelaide told her she didn’t think Hella was the ceremony type of girl, and normally she wouldn’t be. But if she’s going to be Adelaide’s _knight_ , then they’re going to do something real. Something for Hella to hold onto.

 _I suppose we’ll both just have to make it up as we go along._ Adelaide’s voice sounded different in Aubade. It sounded different when it was out in the world where Hella could hear it, instead of echoing inside her own head, with only herself to trust that it’s real.

 _I assure you, I’m here._ Hella knows the look on Adelaide’s face without seeing it. Her sideways smile, nothing so common as a smirk. It’s the look in her eyes that makes it, that projects what she wants it to mean: utter surety that she is _better_ than you. 

It makes Hella’s blood boil, even in its absence. “I don’t have to do this,” she points out, crossing her arms. At nothing. Ugh. “I don’t actually need to help you.” 

_Oh, is that what this is?_ You’re _helping_ me _? I was under the impression I was doing you a favor._

They haven’t really—talked about it. What it is they’re doing here. They got kind of distracted, which was maybe a mistake. “You offered me a job,” Hella says. “That’s a favor now?”

 _I’ve seen what you’re like when you don’t have a job to do, Hella Varal. So yes. I think it is._ Hella can picture the expression that goes with this tone of voice, too: chin tilted up, haughty to what would be a comical level on anyone else. Adaire likes to mock Adelaide by sticking her nose in the air, speaking to the ceiling, and it makes Hella laugh in the moment. But whenever she’s faced with the actual look on Adelaide’s face, she doesn’t much feel like laughing.

Turns out after enough boat rides, you really do get to know a person. A god. A queen. Whatever. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Maybe it’s a good thing Adelaide isn’t particularly corporeal anymore; Hella wouldn’t put it past her to grab her chin. As it is, the wind picks up, chilling Hella to the bone. _I don’t need a knight who is uninterested in the position,_ says Adelaide, voice silky over the words. 

Hella’s interested. Every part of her body is telling Adelaide that, if she cared to look: the speed of her pulse and the set of her shoulders and unsteadiness in her legs.

But she can’t just _say_ that. Not to Adelaide. They don’t do things the straightforward way. They never have. 

So Hella drops to her knees and unsheathes her sword in one smooth movement, laying it across her thighs. She dips her head. She can’t say it any more clearly than that.

For a long moment there is only the wind, and then Adelaide is—there and not there. Head bowed, Hella can see the sweep of her gown, trailing against the ground. If Hella looks at it straight on, she can see that beneath her knees is only dirt, but out of the corner of her eye, it is smooth black marble. If she really looks, there’s no one there. If she doesn’t, Adelaide stands before her, regal and imposing.

She bends down, dragging her fingers first from Hella’s knee to her thigh, finding the scar there unerringly. Hella startles, jerking her head up. For a moment their eyes meet, and then Hella sees nothing but sky. When she looks down again, she catches Adelaide’s fingers trailing across the blade. It should cut her, but when Adelaide pulls her hand back, she is unbloodied. The hilt grows warm in Hella’s grip, slipping against her palm.

“There,” Adelaide says, her voice startlingly clear now, crystal instead of clouded glass. “Now you’ll carry death wherever you walk. More literally than before, perhaps. Use it wisely.”

Hella nods. She doesn’t trust herself to speak.

“And what will you offer me in return for my generous gift to you, Hella?”

Hella doesn’t have much to offer that Adelaide hasn’t already taken—her tolerance, her obedience, her breath, stolen the moment that Adelaide got too close. “I think this would be easier if you just told me what you want. I can do anything you ask. You know I can.” 

Adelaide’s fingers touch Hella’s cheek, her thumb pressing against the point of her jaw, tilting her face up to meet Adelaide’s eyes. This time, Adelaide doesn’t disappear. “You’ll serve me as death’s knight,” she says. Her breath is much warmer than the wind. “You’ll send the dead you find to me, properly. You’ll help me build my kingdom.” All at once, the calm veneer of her expression fractures. She smiles, showing her teeth. “And you’ll keep me company,” she says, thumb moving against Hella’s cheekbone, “won’t you?”

Hella swallows. She manages, “Yes,” the word like honey down her throat. She wants Adelaide to bend down further; she wants her to step back. She wants Adelaide to push her to the ground or yank her to her feet. “Sure. My sword is yours.”

“Just the sword?” Adelaide asks, with that same flash of teeth, unbearable smugness in her voice, and then she’s gone, nothing but still air and a silent dead grove in her wake. 

Hella makes the walk back to the University swiftly, with her sword unsheathed. It feels right in her hand in a way that it hasn’t since she last left Ordenna. She doesn’t want to let it go.

When Hella undresses that night, she runs her fingers along the scar on her leg, the same path Adelaide traced. It had faded almost to nothing, but it stands out starkly now, as if the wound is months old instead of decades. Hella doesn’t mind. It is what she wanted, after all: something that she can touch, to prove that this is real.

-

Hella feels Adelaide’s disapproval when she lets the first body she sees in the Isles of Flight pass her by. But she’s _busy_. She has better things to do than be beholden to Adelaide. They have bigger things to worry about. Like the moon, which is definitely bigger. She tells herself she’s not going to think about it anymore.

She doesn’t think about it so hard that she kills one of the birds by accident.

Fero is never going to let her live this down. But she’s Hella Varal. Standing still is not her style. She’s a blade; she’s meant to strike. Even if maybe she didn’t mean to strike quite _that_ hard.

 _Clumsy,_ Adelaide comments. Hella’s busy climbing her way down onto the beach. She doesn’t have the breath to respond. But she thinks, very hard in Adelaide’s general direction, that _hey_ , I hit him, didn’t I?

 _True. You_ do _have a very good arm._

Hella snorts, and keeps climbing.

She does end up regretting getting Adelaide’s attention. Her first negotiations with a future resident of Adularia don’t go so well. But she gets there in the end. 

Burying a body is simple enough, at least. Hella keeps her eyes on the ground. The moon will keep falling whether she watches it or not.

The tide washes in, faster than it should, and when it recedes it leaves behind footprints in the sand, and Adelaide’s voice, digging just as deep in Hella’s ears, prickling across the back of her neck. “I see that perhaps on the job learning wasn’t the best strategy.”

“Fuck off,” Hella says, burying the shovel in the sand. 

Adelaide’s laugh stings like ocean water against a cut. When Hella looks up, there are still only footprints, but she feels _something_ brush against her shoulder. Could just be the wind. “I wasn’t expecting you to be so eager to fulfill your duties that you would kill the man yourself. You do always surprise me, Hella. It’s appreciated.” It’s incredible, the way that Adelaide can say something that sounds like a compliment and twist the words in her mouth so that they come out cutting. Hella’s never quite learned that trick. Her words always come out however they like.

“Yeah, well, you know me. I live to please.” She’s almost done. She’d be done _already_ , if Adelaide’s presence wasn’t so—distracting.

“You say that like it isn’t true.”

Hella rolls her eyes. “I don’t know if you noticed, but I did just kill a cop. On accident. Not much of a people pleaser.”

“And yet you always find a way to please me.”

Something brushes against Hella’s cheek, soft and cool. “Believe me,” Hella says. “It’s not intentional.”

She puts her head down and keeps working. Talking people into choosing Adelaide’s realm over the Heat and the Dark—that’s not the kind of thing she’s good at. She’s good at this: doing steady work that needs to be done. Why couldn’t Adelaide have asked for something like that?

Why did Hella agree, when what Adelaide wanted was something so complicated?

Ugh. Probably Adelaide just likes watching Hella flounder.

Hella thought that things would be different. That there would be clear instructions, lists of people to find and drag into the afterlife. But Adelaide has always refused to be what anyone expects, especially Hella. She thought it would be more like the army, the routines she knows by heart: the knowledge of when you’re supposed to wake up and where you’re supposed to go and who you’re supposed to kill. But Adelaide’s no general. She doesn’t give Hella marching orders. She sits back and watches and waits to see what Hella will do.

It would be easy to hate death, in a place like Hieron is now. Death is taking everything away from them—it hollows out Throndir’s eyes, hunches Hadrian’s back, tenses Adaire’s shoulders until it looks like she’s ready to snap. But Hella doesn’t. She never has. Death’s been many things to her, in the long course of her life. A way to protect herself, a way to wield power, a way to prove her worth. These days, it’s the opportunity to finally rest, one day. 

Not yet, though. She’s still got Adelaide’s work to do.

-

The Last University is still standing by the time they get back. Hella settles into her old routines: training, helping out wherever a strong arm is needed, sitting up with Adaire by the fire, listening to all the latest gossip.

Hella hasn’t carved wood since she was young, watching her mother’s knife move fast and sharp, but she’s taken it up again. It isn’t going well. Adaire, apparently, notices.

“Have you tried, I don’t know, buying her something?” Adaire asks. Hella looks up.

Hella’s been trying to carve a swan, graceful and vicious. “That’s not what—we don’t exactly have a gift giving kind of relationship.” Hella doesn’t have the words to explain it. It’s too big for that, and words aren’t really her style, anyway.

“Sure.”

“I’m making _fun_ of her. Obviously. She deserves it, she made fun of me. While I was doing the stuff she told me to do in the first place!”

Adaire rolls her eyes. “Uh- _huh_.”

Hella resists the deeply legitimate urge to toss the carving at Adaire’s head. “What’s _your_ suggestion, then?”

“I don’t know! What do fancy death queens like?” 

Adelaide likes summer wines, pristine white clothing, and most of all, making Hella squirm. Hella isn’t really inclined to give her any of those things. “Pissing me off, mostly.”

“You could always try an apology card. That seemed to go over well with everyone else.” Adaire makes a face at her when Hella punches her in the shoulder, and then sticks out her tongue. She props her head on her fist, squinting at Hella. “Why exactly did you agree to this, anyway? All this, you know, knight stuff. I thought you wanted to get rid of Adelaide.”

“She’s kind of a hard person to get rid of.”

“How would you know? You’ve never tried.”

“Stop looking at me like that,” Hella says. “I killed her, and she still wouldn’t leave me alone! I ended up _trapped inside a sword_ , and she found a way to follow me there, too! Trust me, I am the _champion_ of trying to get Adelaide to leave me alone.” 

“And now you’re running around Hieron doing her bidding,” Adaire says. “So you’re definitely still trying to get rid of her.”

Hella peels off another sliver of wood, scowling. “At least I know where I stand with her. What I’m supposed to do.”

Adaire sighs, leaning back on her hands and peering into the fire instead of at Hella. “Yeah,” she says. “Believe me, I get that.”

That night, Hella dreams of giving Adelaide the a finished carving of the swan, of pressing it into her hands like a joke and being thanked as though she’s brought Adelaide something of immeasurable value, instead of a kind of shitty carving with rude implications. 

“I wouldn’t put that on display, if I were you,” Hella tells her.

“It’s no small thing, to give me something made of your own hands.” It’s the kind of total non sequitur that dreams tend to produce, Hella thinks.

“It’s not a gift.”

“Oh? Then what is it?”

If Hella wanted to give Adelaide something _nice_ , she would’ve bought some jewelry from a passing merchant and called it a day. Hella’s never learned how to give anyone anything that isn’t owed, that doesn’t come with strings attached. Sometimes she feels like she’s just a marionette, a puppet to be moved by Adelaide’s whims, and sometimes she feels so untethered that it’s terrifying, as though she’s surrounded by nothing, the Heat and the Dark come to eat her alive at last.

She feels better, when she owes Adelaide something, or when she is owed. She understands that. She luxuriates in the safety of it. 

“Just something to make sure you don’t forget about me.”

“I assure you,” Adelaide says, prim as anything, “I won’t.”

When Hella wakes, she has no idea if any of it was real or not. 

The swan’s certainly nowhere to be found. Adaire could have thrown it in the fire, for everyone’s good. Hella doesn’t ask.

-

Hieron gets worse and Hella’s dreams get weirder. She dreams of vines wrapped around her ankles, of the dark eating them away, of a heat so blistering and terrible it blocks out everything else. 

They never last for very long, though. There will be a cool touch at her wrist, Adelaide’s icy hands dragging her into Adularia, because she’s decided she needs to bother Hella again. Good timing, for once.

“You should really learn how to warn a girl.”

“I wasn’t aware that you required warning for anything.” Adelaide’s not on her throne, which is odd. She’s sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of it, which is odder. The outfit she’s wearing wouldn’t have looked out of place when they sailed together in Aubade. Or when Hella sailed, and Adelaide insisted on sitting precariously on the railing and mocking her.

It’s discomfiting. Adelaide’s not supposed to be on her level. Hella isn’t supposed to have to look down at her. 

She crouches before her instead. “Well?”

Adelaide raises one annoyingly perfect eyebrow. “Well?”

“What am I here for?”

“Can’t I just want to take some time to chat with an old friend?”

It’s never just a chat with Adelaide. “Fine. So chat.”

Adelaide says nothing for _just_ long enough that Hella opens her mouth again—and that, of course, is when she chooses to speak. “How do you like it?”

“How do I like _what_?”

“Your new position.” 

“Fishing for compliments is beneath you.”

Adelaide looks up at her, eyes flinty. Hella stands up from her crouch, because it’s do that or fall under the weight of Adelaide’s gaze. 

“What do you actually need from me?” Hella demands. 

Adelaide shrugs. “Entertainment, perhaps. I think the more salient question is, what do _you_ need?”

Hella doesn’t need anything. She needs a rope to tie around her waist. She needs a good night’s sleep, and she supposes she’s getting it.

She needs Adelaide to look at her and keep looking, and truthfully, she’s had that since the first day they met. Everything Hella does, even when she was trying to shake Adelaide off, only seems to hold her attention: infuriating her, ignoring her, following her meandering and roundabout orders. It all leads to the same place. To both of them standing here, tangled up in one another.

Adelaide’s realm is weird. Hella thinks about standing in the courtyard, and in a moment she’s there, the throne room melting away from around them like dirt in a rainstorm. 

“You haven’t asked me to do anything else.” Hella offers a hand, and Adelaide takes her elbow, using Hella’s arm to lever herself to her feet. Her clothes are spotless. Of course. It’s her realm, after all. The mud would never do anything so rude as stick to Adelaide’s clothes. 

“You have your task.”

Hella turns, taking in the developing city around her. She bends at the waist, inspecting the structure of the nearest half constructed buildings. She kicks at one of the support beams. The house shudders.

“And that task is _not_ to destroy my city before it’s even begun.”

“Yeah,” Hella says, “that’s your job, right?” There’s lumber nearby, a hammer and nails. Hella gets to work.

She can feel Adelaide’s eyes on her the whole time, like the constant prick of a needle.

“You don’t have to do that,” Adelaide says, finally. “Not that I mind the view.”

Hella wipes the sweat from her forehead with her wrist—of course she sweats in a dream. This place is Adelaide’s, after all. As if she would make it any more comfortable for Hella. “If I don’t do it, who’s going to? Your loyal subjects?” 

Adelaide balances her chin on one hand delicately. Her fingernails glimmer an iridescent white, like mother-of-pearl. Senselessly, Hella thinks that Adaire would tell her to try buying Adelaide some nail polish. “Who did it in Aubade?”

“That what you’re trying to do? Just make a replica of the place that bored us both to tears?” 

“What are _you_ trying to do, then?”

“What you asked.” Hella finishes hammering in a nail, and throws her best smirk over her shoulder. “Keeping you entertained.”

Adelaide blinks at her for a moment, and then she throws her head back and laughs in a way Hella has never seen from her: unrestrained, with no thought for how it looks. Not a little smugly, Hella thinks she’s probably the only one who’s ever made Adelaide laugh like that. 

She finishes fixing the house. Adelaide watches, and she talks, asking about the details of Hella’s life she would never have expected Adelaide to notice—the state of the University’s food stores, Red Jack’s drinking contests, the betting pool on how much longer Fero is going to stay. 

It’s not comfortable. Nothing with Adelaide is ever comfortable. But comfort’s not what either of them want. 

-

There was something almost hesitant about Adelaide that night. It’s so strange that Hella worries at it like a loose tooth when she wakes the next morning. It’s just as sharp and jagged a thought, that maybe Adelaide doesn’t know what she’s doing either. What she wants. 

Or she knows, and doesn’t know how to ask. As if she has to ask. Hella is hers to command whether she likes it or not.

It’s fine. Adelaide doesn’t have to know what she wants. It’s Hella’s job to give it to her anyway. 

They’ve become used to Hella at the Last University now. She’s the first person they wake, when someone dies. They’ve been waking her up more and more often. 

Sometimes Hella thinks about rolling over and ignoring it. Skipping the rites just this once. Does it really matter? They’re all probably going to get sucked into the Heat and the Dark soon enough, whether Hella misses an hour of sleep or not. 

The thought doesn’t scare her, exactly. Death hasn’t ever scared Hella, even if that isn’t quite what this is. It would scare her if she didn’t have something to do about it. But she has her missions, from the Last University and from Adelaide. They’ll stop it or they won’t, but not from Hella’s lack of trying.

They expand the graveyard once and then twice. Hella notices, because she’s started spending a lot of time there. She tells Adaire it’s because it’s peaceful, but that’s only part of the truth. It’s not that Adelaide is there, exactly. But the whole place is permeated by the same sharp coldness that Adelaide carries with her everywhere, the mantle of death, her presence lingering. It feels like the moments after a snowstorm, the whole world turned to ice, sharp and beautiful with it. 

Hella starts leaving flowers on the graves. She’s careful when she picks them. She doesn’t take any of the ones that feel alive in the wrong way. 

A few weeks later, she’s woken up in the middle of the night again. It’s Adelaide this time, shaking her awake with an arm that isn’t there when Hella opens her eyes. She groans, and rolls over, and half falls out of bed, pulling on her boots.

“I hate you,” she says. The only response is her door creaking open.

The path to the infirmary from her quarters is familiar by now. Rosana is standing at the door, rubbing at her eyes.

“Long night?” Hella asks.

Rosana laughs. “Most of them are, these days,” she says. “We were just going to send someone for you. It’s Ceres Klinta.”

Hella knows Klinta. She’s one of the Ordennan defectors. Hella’s mostly stayed away from her—as much as she has to stay away from anyone, considering how creepy her reputation’s gotten—because where Hella stands with the Ordennans who’ve thrown in with the University isn’t entirely clear. Hella tries to at least pretend that she still belongs to Ordenna. She doesn’t know who believes it.

“Was she sick?”

“Hunting accident,” Rosana says. “The woods have been a little…”

“Yeah.” Hella inclines her head towards the infirmary. “So, uh.” There’s no graceful way to ask if she’s dead or just dying. 

Rosana smiles at her. “Go ahead,” she says. “I’ll be out here.”

Hella ducks into the infirmary. There’s a chair beside the bed for her already. Klinta is covered in blood, and Hella can tell from her wounds that there wasn’t much hope of saving her. She sits.

_That was shockingly polite, for you._

“I’m busy.” 

_And I was bored._

Hella ignores her, and turns to Klinta’s spirit. She’s sitting crosslegged at the end of the bed, inspecting her own body just as critically as Hella was. “Ugh. It’s you.”

Hella sighs. “Yeah, it’s me.” 

“I thought you were just like a weird priest or something.” Klinta peers around at the infirmary. “I didn’t ask them to call anyone.”

“I’m kind of a special case.”

“Yeah, you’re a special _something_. They were always talking about you in the army. Queenkiller this, Queenkiller that. I was at that stupid parade they threw for you.” 

“They threw me a couple of parades.”

Klinta glares at her. Hella’s been getting better at this, but it’s always complicated when it’s someone who knows her.

_It’s true; you never have been one for making friends._

If Adelaide is here, Hella doesn’t say, why doesn’t she just invite Klinta to Adularia herself? 

“Look. I’m not here to hash out your past. I’m here to make you an offer.”

“What has Queenkiller Hella Varal got to offer to me, a lowly Ordennan soldier who got sick of all that bullshit?”

“That queen I killed runs a new kingdom, now. You can go there now, or you can let the Heat and the Dark swallow you. Your choice.”

Klinta tilts her head at Hella, blinking slowly. “Wow. It’s all a lie, isn’t it? You let them think you’re some big Ordennan hero. But you haven’t been on their side in a long time, have you?”

“Says _you_ ,” Hella says, stung. “You abandoned your post and threw in your lot with the enemy. Ordenna’s not exactly happy with you guys, either.”

Klinta shrugs. “We’re honest about what we’ve done. What we decided was best. At least I know who I am and who I serve,” she says. “Who do _you_ serve, Hella Varal? The queen you let them throw you a parade for killing? I heard you wouldn’t even stand with Ordenna at the Battle of Twinbrook. That you raised arms against us, even then. Are you even still Ordennan at all?”

Stupidly, Hella wants to stand up and draw her sword. To fight a ghost. She presses her hands to her face and groans. “Does it even matter, at this point? I am where I am. I do what I can. Isn’t that all anyone is doing anymore?”

“No,” Klinta says. “ _Some_ people are busy being loyal. You know, idiots. Hey, I’m not complaining. It’s nice to know we’re all deserters here.” She leans back on her hands. They sink into the bedding. “So what’s this kingdom like?”

“Shiny,” Hella says shortly. “And better than getting eaten by nothingness, probably. I don’t know, I don’t live there. The queen is a big pain in the ass.”

“I can deal with that,” Klinta says. “Lead the way.”

It’s still the middle of the night once Klinta is gone. Hella dips into the forest and picks flowers, the cool air comfortable against her skin. The graveyard is empty when she leaves them. Adelaide is silent. 

Hella used to think of Ordenna as more than her home: it was the place who made her who she was. But she’s shaped by Adelaide’s hands, now. She’s not sure who she’s becoming. But she does know it’s better than what Ordenna would have made her. 

_Do you miss it?_

Hella shrugs. “I had a lot of chances to go back.” 

_That’s not an answer._

“If I was still there, I’d be following their orders. I’d storm the City of First Light in a heartbeat.”

 _Perhaps_ , says Adelaide. _But I don’t think that’s who you are anymore._

Hella leaves the last of the flowers at Jerod Shiraz’s grave. “Sure it is. I follow you, don’t I?”

_And you question everything I say. It’s quite annoying, really._

“You like it.” A sudden wind comes, scattering the petals of the flowers Hella’s spent an hour carefully arranging all around the cemetery. “Hey!”

_What? Weren’t they meant for me?_

Hella doesn’t dignify that with an answer.

-

Hella’s faced her own death before. She paid the price. She knows how this works.

“So?” she asks, the black marble of Adelaide’s hall hard beneath her knees. Her blood’s still pooling beneath her, all the color leached from it. There’s no light here. It was a sword that took her, in the end, running cleanly through her stomach. Stomach wounds are a bitch. “What do I need to do?”

Adelaide is beautiful, sitting as if she’s carved from the same marble as her throne, chin on her hand, lids lowered as she watches Hella. “Nothing,” she says. “Death is easy. Well. I make it easy.” Her lips curve.

Hella shakes her head. “I’m going back.” 

“Why?” Adelaide gestures in a wide arc, graceful and pointed as the sweep of a bird’s wing. “You’ve helped me build something here. Don’t you want to stay here and enjoy it?” She rises. On instinct, Hella almost wants to scramble back as she approaches—she’s bleeding, after all, her life running out as the queen of death comes towards her, asking, in a honeyed voiced, for Hella to _stay_. 

But Hella’s body is still unlearning plenty of lessons. It’s only Adelaide. Hella hasn’t been afraid of her in a long time. 

“You know I can’t do that.”

Adelaide sinks to her knees before her, Hella’s blood soaking into her pristine white dress. “Oh? Didn’t you once tell me you could do anything, if only I asked? You seemed quite confident at the time.”

Hella rolls her eyes. She wants to say a lot of obvious things: you’re ruining your dress, you’re sitting too close, you’re missing the point and I _know_ you’re doing it on purpose.

“I’m your knight,” Hella says instead. Words haltingly spoken. She’s not like Adelaide. She never will be. She speaks the only way she knows how, with the rough blunt honesty of an uncut stone. “I’m yours. I can’t be that from here.”

“Hella,” Adelaide says, in a tone that from anyone else would be tender. “You’ll always be mine.” There’s a cut on Hella’s cheek that had mostly scabbed over by the time she died. Adelaide runs her thumb across it, not gently, and the blood starts flowing again in deadly sympathy. 

“I couldn’t stay in Aubade either.”

“ _My kingdom_ is better than the inside of a sword, surely.”

“Adelaide.” Hella doesn’t address her by name often; she can see the effect it has. “You can’t trap me in a box. That’s not what I’m for.”

“No,” Adelaide says. She sounds almost sad. “I suppose not. What a complicated knight you’ve turned out to be.”

Hella bows her head. Adelaide’s fingers are still on her cheek. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” Hella will always give Adelaide what she wants; that doesn’t always mean doing what she’s told.

“Maybe,” says Adelaide. “And what will you give me in exchange? I could use another boat, maybe. I do so miss our little talks.”

“A blade, to point wherever you choose.”

Adelaide smiles. “But I already have _that_.” She leans in close, takes Hella’s head in her hands, takes a kiss. It’s like everything they’ve ever done; Adelaide would call it another step in a dance, but she’d be wrong. It’s the last moment of a battle formation, everything coming together in a clash of steel and blood, teetering over from a methodical plan into utter chaos. It tastes like blood in Hella’s mouth. 

Hella wakes on a battlefield, Adelaide’s breath still warm on her lips and laughter in her ears, familiar as the sword in her gut.

-

Besides Hella, there were only a few other casualties of the battle. The Last University is pretty used to picking up their shit after a disaster by now. Things return to what passes for normal without much trouble. 

Hella’s room is small and cramped. With Adaire’s help, she borrows the nicest set of cups still left in the kitchens. She still has her kettle and her dwindling stock of tea, kept closely guarded at the bottom of her pack. Adaire’s stopped making fun of her for it. They all need their small comforts, these days. 

She boils the water and sets out cups for two. As expected, she doesn’t have to wait long.

_What’s this? A celebration of your glorious return? I suppose they aren’t much for parades here._

Hella points to the empty chair across the table. “Sit.”

_Oh, are you the one who gives me commands now?_

Helplessly, Hella finds herself smiling. It wouldn’t be Adelaide if she didn’t make even the simplest things frustrating. “I’m trying to serve you tea. That a problem?”

“You do love your tea, don’t you.” Adelaide never looks quite whole outside of her kingdom. Her form shimmers here, like a still pool disturbed by a drop of water. 

Hella does. There’s a ritual to it, the same motions done over and over. It stills her mind in the same way that sword drills do.

She pours. Adelaide watches her with careful eyes, the only part of her that doesn’t flicker. 

Hella puts the teapot down. Adelaide brings the cup to her lips, eyes on Hella the whole time. Hella doesn’t know what exactly this feeling is, like hot copper rising up her throat. 

“You forgot to pour some for yourself.”

“Not really.”

Adelaide smiles, a quick slice across her face. “Drink,” she says. Hella pours herself a cup. “Is this what you wanted to come back for? Warm water? We have tea in Adularia, Hella. You could even serve it to me, if it really means so much to you.”

The tea tastes the same as always, rich and warm on Hella’s tongue. When she puts the cup down, Adelaide is still waiting for an answer. “Maybe I just like it here.”

“Of course,” Adelaide says. “There’s so very much to like.” She takes another sip. “Is this what you want? To give up your death? You could have rooms in the palace. You could even have mine. You’d be a knight in the eyes of everyone who met you. You’d have all the respect you could ever want in the world, more adulation than Ordenna ever could have given you. Don’t you want that?”

Hella shrugs, and watches Adelaide’s mouth on the rim of the porcelain. She and Adelaide have found an orbit, lately, one they never had before. Not before Aubade and not during it, when they were, for all purposes, equals. “Only you would think that I’m giving something up, getting another chance at life.” 

“Next to what’s coming,” Adelaide says, “death would be a comfort. You know that.”

Hella does. “I don’t want comfort,” she says. “You were right. I want a job.”

“You want a queen,” Adelaide corrects.

It’s not worth arguing the point. Hella pours Adelaide another cup of tea. Adelaide grips her wrist when she puts the teapot down, and doesn’t let go. It’s not in her nature. Hella is so thankful it hurts.

-

With Tristero, the first death was the end of it. Of course it was. By necessity of his demand, Hella never saw him again after she fulfilled his task. But nothing with Adelaide ever ends. It’s the most frustrating thing about her, and also the most reassuring. The steadiness of her continued presence. 

But death follows Hella, always. It comes at sea this time. Payback, maybe, for all the perilous journeys that Hella has taken and come out of unscathed.

She’s never spent much time imagining what it would be like to drown. It’s cold, and dark, and terrible. Right until the moment the sea spits her out dripping onto cold marble, Hella gasping for breath she no longer needs, on her hands and knees in Adelaide’s throne room.

She’s standing in the precise center of it, incandescent with how angry she is. “Twice, you’ve come back from death,” she says. Her voice echoes strangely, growing louder as it comes towards Hella. “Tell me. Give me _one_ reason I shouldn’t keep you here, by my side.”

“Send me back,” Hella says, coughing. She can’t think, she can’t breathe, she definitely can’t stay here. She can’t let herself. 

“No,” Adelaide says. “I need you here. Someone has to have a care for your safety; it certainly isn’t going to be you.”

“Don’t you get it?” Hella demands. She’s not used to having to spell things out, not with Adelaide. “You are the _only_ thing that makes any sense anymore. The only thing. The gods are dying and the world is crumbling into dust and the plants are trying to kill us, but you are _exactly_ the same, you treat me just the same no matter what else is going on, you look at me and make fun of me and take it as your due that I’ll just do whatever you want. And I will! I will, but I won’t do this. You can’t shield me from what’s coming. I’m the shield. It’s what I’m meant to be.”

“I thought you were a sword,” Adelaide says, almost absently, bending down to look Hella in the eye. Her gaze is intent enough on Hella that it almost feels like a physical touch against her skin.

“I don’t know. I used to be. I think maybe a shield is all any of us can hope to be, anymore. A sword’s not going to save us from the Heat and the Dark.”

“Neither will a shield.”

“No,” says Hella. “But maybe it’ll buy us just a little more time.”

“Buy me a little more time, you mean.” Adelaide’s fingers skim against her cheek, dragging deliberately. “We don’t have to do it this way, you know.”

“What?”

“I can release you. Things could go back to the way they were: Hella Varal the fighter, and the Queen of Pearls, her constant annoyance.” Her mouth quirks. “We were good at that, weren’t we?”

“We’re good at a lot of things.”

Adelaide’s fingers drift down to Hella’s throat. “You could be safe,” she says. “Protected, like all of my subjects. I don’t need your permission. You’re dead three times over. Doesn’t your precious Ordenna have something to say about that?”

None of it’s been quite right, whatever it is Hella’s been trying to do. Her heart blundering ahead of her mind and her feet the way it always does, the way that leads to dead bodies all around her, because that’s what she _does_.

It’s hard to trust anything in the world these days. Hadrian doesn’t know what he’s doing. Hieron himself is gone. But Adelaide will keep Hella’s sword pointed in the right direction, and all she wants in return is that Hella bend the knee.

Her death is the last thing Hella has to give up, the last gift she can give to Adelaide. It doesn’t matter if Adelaide wants it. She’s going to take it. 

“I don’t care about Ordenna. I don’t serve them. I don’t serve anyone else. I serve you,” says Hella. “You’re my queen. Death doesn’t release me from that service.”

Adelaide’s fingers tighten. “Shouldn’t I decide that?”

Hella shrugs. “You know I’ve never been very good at this.”

“Three deaths. Even by the laws of Nacre, you should be gone.”

“Sure,” Hella says. “But you’re not going to let me go, right?”

Adelaide bends down further, nails digging into Hella’s scalp. “No,” she says. It’s always the same with Adelaide. There are so many ways to get under her skin; reverence is starting to become Hella’s favorite. She figures she’ll have a long time to keep trying it out.

This time, Adelaide kisses with teeth. She leaves bruises on Hella’s hips that linger when she washes up on the shore, salt in her mouth, alive and aching.

Death follows Hella always; she has faced it three times. She knows in her heart this will not be the last.

**Author's Note:**

> catch me on twitter and tumblr as luckydicekirby!


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